ECS Bare Metal Instance overview

ECS Bare Metal Instances are a computing service that combines the elasticity of virtual
machines and the performance and features of physical machines. ECS Bare Metal Instances
are designed based on the state-of-the-art virtualization 2.0 technology developed
by Alibaba Cloud. The virtualization used by ECS Bare Metal Instances is optimized
to support common ECS instances and nested virtualization, maintaining the elastic
performance and user experience of physical machines.

ECS Bare Metal Instances combine the strengths of both physical machines and ECS instances
to deliver powerful and robust computing capabilities. With the virtualization 2.0
technology, ECS Bare Metal Instances provide your business applications with direct
access to the processor and memory resources of the underlying servers without virtualization
overheads. ECS Bare Metal Instances keep the hardware feature sets (such as Intel®
VT-x) and resource isolation capabilities of physical machines, ideal for applications
that need to run in non-virtualization environments.

By virtue of the independently developed chips and hypervisor system software and
the redefined server hardware architecture, ECS Bare Metal Instances deeply integrate
features from both physical and virtual machines. ECS Bare Metal Instances can seamlessly
connect with other Alibaba Cloud products for storage, networking, and database tasks.
ECS Bare Metal Instances are fully compatible with ECS instance images. These properties
allow you to build resources to suit your business requirements.

ECS Bare Metal Instances can address the needs of high-performance computing and help
you build new hybrid clouds. Thanks to the flexibility, elasticity, and other strengths
inherited from the mix of physical and virtual machines, ECS Bare Metal Instances
can implement re-virtualization. Offline private clouds can be seamlessly migrated
to Alibaba Cloud without the performance overheads that may arise from nested virtualization,
giving you a new method to move businesses onto the cloud.

Support for heterogeneous instruction set processors

The virtualization 2.0 technology used by ECS Bare Metal Instances is developed independently
by Alibaba Cloud, and supports ARM and other instruction set processors at no additional
cost.

When you use ECS Bare Metal Instances, note the following items:

ECS Bare Metal Instances cannot be upgraded or downgraded.

If a hardware fault occurs to an ECS Bare Metal Instance, a failover occurs and data
is stored in the disks of the ECS Bare Metal Instance.